“My mother thinks you’re filling my head with nonsense,” she says quietly.
“Am I?”Callum asks.
“No,” Isla says immediately.“You’re doing the opposite.You’re letting me think.”
Callum nods once.“That’s usually enough.”
She turns back to him, frustration simmering.“Why didn’t he tell you about me?”
The question is raw, unfiltered.
Callum doesn’t flinch.“I don’t know.”
“But he trusted you,” Isla presses.“He raised you.”
“Yes.”
“So why not me?”Her voice cracks despite her control.“Why was I the thing he kept hidden?”
Callum swallows.“Because you weren’t a secret,” he says quietly.“You were a wound.”
The words settle heavily between them.
Callum continues, slower now.“Keir hid the things he couldn’t fix.Not because they didn’t matter, but because they mattered too much.”
Isla presses her lips together, absorbing that.“That doesn’t make it better.”
“No,” Callum agrees.“It makes it tragic.”
Silence stretches.
Outside, the sky deepens toward evening.Somewhere below, the castle settles with a soft groan, like an old animal shifting in its sleep.
“My mother thinks Scotland is changing me,” Isla says eventually.
Callum watches her closely.“Is it?”
“Yes,” Isla admits.“But not the way she thinks.”
He waits.
“It’s making me see how small my world has been,” Isla says.“How carefully managed.How little of it was actually mine.”
Callum’s voice is low when he answers.“That tends to happen when you stop running.”
She meets his gaze, something unspoken tightening between them again.
“Don’t do that,” Isla says softly.
“Do what?”
“Look at me like that.”
Callum exhales, turning slightly toward the window.“Then don’t say things that make it hard not to.”
Her pulse jumps.
They stand there, the space between them charged but restrained, like the storage room all over again, only this time, the door is open, and neither of them is leaving.
